Where to See Nativity Scenes in Germany

This is the first place to go, and also the one where people most often show up at the wrong time of year.

Krippensammlung, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum Prinzregentenstraße 3, Munich

The nativity gallery is only open from late October to late February, according to the museum itself. Many guides say it’s open year-round. It isn’t, and that’s the kind of mistake that can cost you a day. The museum’s visitor page.

What you’ll see

Nativity scenes from Naples, Sicily and the Alps, made between 1700 and the early 1900s. Highlights the museum points out: a nativity set in a marble palace with the Three Kings, a Jahreskrippe that changes through the Church year, a nativity with an imaginary view of Jerusalem, one set at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, another laid out like a Naples street with market scenes, a paper nativity, and one from the Servite friary in Innsbruck. The collection’s page.

Where it comes from Reported

It was left to the museum by Max Schmederer (1854–1917), a co-owner of a Munich brewery who already had well over two thousand figures by 1893 and retired in 1897 to devote himself to collecting. He designed the gallery’s layout himself, in the building that opened in 1900. The city’s tourist office says six thousand figures and twenty thousand pieces in more than 5,400 square feet; the museum itself gives no total.

Practical

Tuesday and Wednesday 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Thursday until 8 p.m., Friday to Sunday 10 a.m.–5 p.m., closed Mondays. €7, €1 on Sundays, free under eighteen. Several other galleries are closed for renovation, but the nativity collection is open.

Bamberg is Germany’s nativity city: a trail of about forty stops, a private museum, a chapel full of nativities, and a parish nativity like no other.

Obere Pfarre (Our Lady) Frauenplatz 1, Bamberg. Free admission

The parish has counted its figures: one hundred seventy-eight, the oldest carved in wood in the early 1700s. Baron Philipp von Künsburg donated many of them in 1850. The nativity’s page.

What makes it unique

It doesn’t stay the same. Seven scenes take turns, changed every other Saturday around 1 p.m.: the Annunciation, the search for a place to stay, the holy night, the Wise Men, the Flight into Egypt, the Wedding at Cana, and the wise and foolish virgins. Those last two aren’t usually part of a nativity: you come to see the Nativity and find a parable. The season runs from the Saturday before the First Sunday of Advent to the end of February.

Bamberger Krippenmuseum Obere Sandstraße 23, Bamberg

A private collection opened in November 2001 by the art historian Erk Baumann, in the old headquarters of a gingerbread company founded in 1818: 3,200 square feet of nativity scenes from four centuries and more than seventy countries. €6. Open from the Saturday before the First Sunday of Advent to December 23, then from December 25 to January 6; the rest of the year by appointment only.

Maternkapelle Maternstraße 10, Bamberg. Free admission

More than thirty-five nativity scenes shown every winter by the Bamberger Krippenfreunde, the volunteer group that has also run the city’s nativity trail for about forty years. Among them is the nativity from Saint Theodore’s church.

In Westphalia, far from Bavaria, a museum that has held a nativity exhibition for almost a hundred years, and numbers every one.

RELÍGIO: Westphalian Museum of Religious Culture Herrenstraße 1-2, Telgte

Each year’s exhibition is numbered. The eighty-third, in 2023–2024, had more than a hundred nativity scenes. The eighty-fifth, in 2025–2026, was called Hoffnung (Hope) and featured work by nearly a hundred artists, nativities from sculptors’ workshops, nativities from around the world showing the Flight into Egypt, and a puppet nativity. The museum’s page.

The rhythm

It opens the second weekend of November and closes at the end of January, and has for decades. Tuesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; closed Mondays and December 24 and 31. €7 for the exhibition and the collection, €5 for the collection only, free under seventeen.

The Bavarian village known for woodcarving and the Passion Play. Its nativity wasn’t bought either: local carvers made it over several generations.

Oberammergau Museum Dorfstraße 8, Oberammergau, Upper Bavaria

The historic church nativity has about two hundred figures. The oldest are from the 1700s, most from the 1800s, and the Wedding at Cana was added around 1860. It shows the Nativity, the procession of the Wise Men and that wedding. The museum’s page.

The paper nativities

The museum also has paper nativities (Papierkrippen) by Franz Seraph Zwinck (1748–1792), the painter who covered the village’s houses with 3D-looking murals. You won’t find many nativities like these elsewhere: figures painted and cut out of paper, set up like stage scenery. They were the poor family’s nativity, and often the most creative.

When, and how much

It’s the only place on this page that has already posted its schedule: the museum is open March 28 to November 8, 2026, then November 28, 2026, to February 14, 2027, Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Mondays, December 24 and January 1. €5, or €9 for a combined ticket. The museum doesn’t say whether the church nativity is up for the whole season.

Every other nativity on this page is old or part of a collection. This one is made new each year, for the times we’re living in.

Milieukrippe, Sankt Maria in Lyskirchen An Lyskirchen 10, Cologne. Free admission

The Nativity is set in 1930s Cologne, and the scene is filled with people from the edges of today’s city: the homeless, refugees, people living on the street. Benjamin Marx has designed and built it for about twenty years, with a new theme each season. In 2025–2026 it was Mary, Undoer of Knots, inspired by the Baroque painting by Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner. The nativity’s website.

When, and where the candle money goes

From the First Sunday of Advent to Candlemas, February 2. The church is open daily, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (Sundays until 5:30 p.m.), and it’s free. Money from candle offerings goes to the nativity and to the Notel, a night shelter in the city.

Four museums just for nativity scenes. The last one is in the Protestant north, and it’s the one that’s open all year.

Krippenmuseum Oberstadion Oberstadion, Baden-Württemberg

In a historic barn from 1612. Nativities by artists from Germany, Austria and Italy (including Angela Tripi of Sicily and the Haseidl brothers of Oberammergau), plus a new nativity made for the museum each year. €6, €2.50 ages 11 to 18, free under 10; wheelchair accessible. The museum’s website.

Weilheimer Krippenmuseum Petelgasse 6, Weilheim in Oberbayern

More than a hundred thirty nativity scenes on three floors, with more than eighteen hundred figures, including a Brettlkrippe (flat painted figures on boards) from 1721 and landscape nativities from 1880, plus pieces from Peru and Africa. Open from the First Sunday of Advent to mid-January, Friday to Sunday, every day during the Christmas holidays, and again from Palm Sunday to Easter Monday. The museum’s website.

Schwäbisches Krippenmuseum Hermelestraße 4, Mindelheim, Bavarian Swabia

In the old Jesuit school, which is fitting, since the Jesuits brought the nativity to Germany. Five centuries of Swabian nativities, including the oldest known in the region, first set up in 1618, and a walk through history from the Jesuits to mass production: clay, wax, papier-mâché, plastic. In town there are two more nativities: one in the Stadtpfarrkirche St. Stephan, from Advent to February 2, and the Spitalkrippe on Maximilianstraße, on view all year. The museum’s page; hours and prices aren’t posted online, so call ahead.

Norddeutsches Krippenmuseum Heiligengeisthof 5, Güstrow, Mecklenburg

A nativity museum in the Protestant north, in the Church of the Holy Spirit: about seven hundred nativity scenes from every continent, built around three hundred fifty that Mechthild Ringguth of Hamburg collected over forty years in some sixty countries. The materials alone are worth the trip: amber, iron, recycled paper, leftover yarn, horseshoe nails, Irish peat, and a tiny nativity carved into a sloe pit. Open all year, €4.50. The museum’s website.

The Ore Mountains in Saxony are the home of wooden toys and Christmas pyramids, and of the nutcrackers and incense smokers sold in American Christmas shops. They’re often listed as a place to see nativities, but the real story is more interesting.

What a Weihnachtsberg is

The main tradition here isn’t the Italian or Alpine nativity but the Weihnachtsberg, or “Christmas mountain”: a mountain landscape that mixes the Nativity with scenes of local mining life, often with moving parts. The miner and the angel, the pyramids turned by candle heat, the wooden smokers: it’s Christmas folk art, not a nativity scene in the strict sense. We’d rather be clear about that than blur the two.

Erzgebirgisches Spielzeugmuseum Hauptstraße 73, Kurort Seiffen, Saxony

Thousands of objects on three floors: toys from 1800 on, nativity scenes and Christmas mountains (including one showing Midnight Mass in Seiffen), and a pyramid 20½ feet tall. €10.70, €2 ages 4 to 16. Note: the museum was closed for renovation from April 13 to October 2, 2026, according to its homepage. The museum’s website.

History explains why the museums are where they are, and it’s worth telling from the start.

The Jesuits, and the first nativity

The first nativity scene as we know it was set up in Prague in 1562 by the Jesuits; a description from 1581 mentions life-size figures of the Holy Family. It spread fast: Munich in 1607, Innsbruck around 1608, Hall in Tyrol in 1609, Salzburg by 1615. Jesuits, Servites and Franciscans spread it as part of the Catholic renewal after the Reformation. That’s why the Mindelheim museum is in an old Jesuit school. It’s no coincidence.

Then the Enlightenment drove it out of the churches

It started in Austria and Salzburg. Empress Maria Theresa banned some religious performances as early as 1752; a 1777 law targeted plays with live actors, including nativity and Three Kings plays; and in the 1780s, Archbishop Colloredo banned figures he considered “ridiculous” or “unseemly” from his lands. In Franconia and Bavaria it came later, in 1803, when church property was taken over by the state. The Würzburg order explained that these displays had only been useful while “the people were still at so low a degree of culture and enlightenment.” In Bamberg, the Obere Pfarre parish dates the ban to November 4, 1803, and says many nativity scenes were destroyed or stored away in attics.

It moved: from the nave to the living room

Banned from churches, the nativity moved into homes. People set them up at their neighbors’, out of sight of the authorities, and that’s how the German home nativity, and its builders’ clubs, were born. King Ludwig I of Bavaria lifted the ban just before Christmas 1825. Bamberg’s nativity was then restored, and in 1850 Baron von Künsburg added to it with his gift. Those are the figures you still see there today.

And that’s where the museums come from

A century of nativities at home produced collectors. Max Schmederer in Munich, Erk Baumann in Bamberg, Mechthild Ringguth for Güstrow: Germany’s great nativity museums all started as private collections. The nativity was pushed out of the churches by law, and it came back as gifts.